


Teach Me How to Fall in Love

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1930s, Minor Internalized Homophobia, Multi, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:44:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6297640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eliza B. Goldberg knew how to stand on her own two feet, how to lead the fight against every injustice she saw in the world. (After all, it's the lessons you learn when you're young that remain, even if it takes years to understand the men who taught them.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teach Me How to Fall in Love

**Author's Note:**

> This was for foxfireflamequeen's prompt, where "Bucky Barnes is very much the Oldest of Four." But Eliza's been waiting awhile for her chance to speak, and so we ended up with this instead. (Remember, Eliza's picture hangs on Pepper's office wall for years, one of her heroes decades before she ever knew what the B. in 'Eliza B. Goldberg' meant.)

Eliza B. Goldberg passed her bar exam in 1950, three years after her wedding, a year after the birth of her daughter, and six years after her brother’s last letter home (five years and seven months since he’d died).

Her brother had introduced her to Marty, back in 1943 when Jamie had been at the Army base in Jersey and Lizzie had gotten herself thrown in the paddy wagon when she took the cops to task for picking on someone with more heart than brains, and no brawn at all.  Becky had posted a frantic telegraph to the base, because their brother always knew what to do when things got bad.  (Because their brother knew what to do when someone you loved kept ending up at the police station, staunching their bloody nose on the scuffed sleeve of their shirt.)

Becky would have asked someone else, she told them, glowering through the bars and scrubbing at her eyes as though they weren’t red and her hands weren’t tucked under her arms where they wouldn’t shake—she would have asked  _ someone else _ , but the only other person they could go to was sitting right next to Lizzie, one arm wrapped around her shoulders and choking on his own air.

Martin Goldberg showed up at the station at two in the morning, his hair a curly red halo and sleep crusted in the corners of his light brown eyes.  He smiled through the bars and handed over an asthma cigarette and a clean handkerchief, because apparently he’d broken Steven G. Rogers out of jail before.

“What were you thinking?” Lizzie’s brother bellowed into the police chief’s phone at three am, because Martin had promised him that they would call.

“They were being mean to Steve,” she said, and Becky cocked her hip and mimicked a whine that didn’t sound like Lizzie at all.

“People are always mean to Steve!” the shouting continued.  Lizzie hoped he woke everyone on base.  “He’s a jackass!  But he doesn’t need your help fighting his battles, moonface.”

“Shut up,” Lizzie said, scowling at the phone, and shook her curls forward to hide her round cheeks.

“She takes after you, jerk,” Steve cut in, taking the receiver away and speaking too low, the way he always did after the cigarettes loosened up his lungs.  “Now what pretty names were you calling me, huh?”  Lizzie could hear the quiet hum of her brother’s voice, but she couldn’t make out the words.  Steve coughed, and his cheeks went pink under the buzzing neon flare of the station’s lights.  “Yeah, yeah,” he finally said, shaking his head and biting down on his lower lip.  “You’re all talk, Barnes.  Yeah.  Okay.  Oh, fuck you.”

Steve hung up the phone and rolled his eyes, still smiling.  “Your brother says we should get home,” he finally announced, taking in Lizzie’s flushed face and disheveled hair, Becky’s frown and Martin’s wide yawn.  Becky agreed, shoving Lizzie into the sweater she’d brought, wrapping an arm around her little sister’s waist and refusing to let go even after they’d climbed into bed, shoving Nonie over to the edge of the mattress and ignoring her indignant snore.

A month later her brother had come home, dashing in his dress uniform, his hair slicked back and every girl on their block trying to bring him home for dinner and convince him to stay for dessert.

“Don’t be disgusting,” Lizzie told her best friend, when Dolores opened too many buttons on her blouse and freshened her lipstick before greeting Sergeant James B. Barnes hello.  “ _ Ewww _ ,” she added, when her brother kissed Dolores on the cheek and winked.

“Are you ready?” he asked her, because brothers were stupid and didn’t think their sisters were grown up enough to enroll at Baruch college on their own, even though it was Jamie who’d taught Lizzie how to climb out the window and shimmy down the drain pipe without getting caught.  Then he opened her purse and pulled out the lipstick with a frown.  “What’s this?”  He shook the tube and scowled.  “None of this, Elizabeth.  You’re not some girl at a club.”

“I paid for it!” Lizzie cried, reaching out to grab it and missing by a mile.  Well, Becky had paid for it—and technically Becky didn’t know that Lizzie had it, but it still wasn’t fair for Jamie to take it away.

Jamie ignored her, turning around and brandishing the lipstick at Steve.  “What do you say, punk?  Wanna doll yourself up for me?”  He puckered his lips, sputtering out a laugh when Steve rolled his eyes and shoved Lizzie’s brother away.  “Ah, come on.  I’ll take you dancing.  Let you step on my toes.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Steve growled, elbowing Jamie in the ribs and tripping him out the door.  Lizzie had never seen her lipstick again.

It was 1943, the last summer Lizzie had seen her brother alive.  She had turned nineteen that year, old enough to earn her own money and hold her own rivet gun.  Smart enough to persuade them to hire her sister, too, because Nonie was a pretty seventeen and bound for trouble without their brother there to tell her no.  Lizzie was brave enough to put her fists up and wade into a fight that Steve Rogers had started—she’d learned how to do both from her brother, the first because he’d taught her to widen her stance, to aim low and strike quick, the second because she’d watched him take down bullies everyday for Steve.

It wasn’t until 1968, though, that she’d understood: Lizzie’s little boy eighteen and taller than her by a head, screaming at her husband that the Goldberg firm could defend blacks and feminists and communists but couldn’t stand that they’d raised a fucking  _ faggot  _ and her Marty had shouted back he should have fucking known it was in the Barnes blood.

It wasn’t until 1968—a year before her husband could talk their son home, ten years after they’d started their own firm, six months since she’d been arrested (again), twenty-three years and three months since her brother had died—that Eliza B. Goldberg finally realized what Steve’s blushing “Oh, fuck you” had meant.

**Author's Note:**

> To Martin's credit: the fight doesn't go well, but that's partly because eighteen year old boys don't listen very well (especially when they've already decided that their parents couldn't possibly love them or understand, and haven't - as Martin put it after, three glasses into a bottle of scotch - bothered to notice that their father had a goddamn apartment in the Village decades before his son even knew what 'flamboyant' meant). So there is homophobia, but it's mostly internalized and connected to the son's fear and self-hatred. (Years later, Lizzie still isn't sure that when her husband shouted it was "in the Barnes blood," he had meant homosexuality or pure ornery pigheadedness. Either way, Martin had never shied away from loving a Barnes, no matter their sexuality or their tendency to end up behind bars.)


End file.
